Academic literature on the topic 'Semi-commercial farmers'

Understanding household farming behavior among smallholders is an essential element of land-change studies inasmuch as a considerable portion of the world is dominated by land-users of this kind. Smallholders (peasants in some literature) are especially important within the tropical forests of Mexico, and the southern Yucatán peninsular region is no exception. This region, as elsewhere in the tropics, is characterized by underdeveloped markets and the consequent partial engagement of frontier farmers as market participants. Sparse exchange opportunities resulting from remoteness, low population density, and poorly developed infrastructure constrain these farmers to maintain a strong focus on consumption production, especially in terms of staple foods. Indeed, until the late 1960s, households in the region were totally subsistence-based and had virtually no experience with the agricultural market. Today, smallholder farmers retain consumption production, though a growing proportion also produce crops for sale. While this dual position in the market and in subsistence is an increasingly prevalent feature of smallholder farmers throughout the developing world, studies of deforestation commonly ascribe to them a wholly commercial orientation by employing profit-maximizing theoretical structures as a basis for econometrically modeling their land-use decisions (e.g. Chomitz and Gray 1996; Cropper, Griffiths, and Mani 1999; Cropper, Puri, and Griffiths 2001; Nelson, Harris, and Stone 2001; Nelson and Hellerstein 1997; Panayotou and Sungsuwan 1994; Pfaff 1999). In essence, the assertion of profit-maximization rests on the assumption that agents are fully engaged in markets, from which it follows that production, being strictly a function of farm technology and exogenously given input and output prices, is entirely independent of consumption and labor supply (Barnum and Squire 1979). This chapter explores the implications of relaxing the perfect-markets assumption for the modeling of semi-subsistence and commercial land-use decisions. By introducing variables measuring the consumption side of the colonist household, evidence is presented to suggest that, consistent with mixed or hybrid production themes (e.g. Singh, Squire, and Strauss 1986; Turner and Brush 1987), farmers operating in a context of thin product and/or labor markets do not exhibit behavior corresponding to that of a commercially oriented profit-maximizing farm.

After maize, the commercial cultivation of jalapeño chili (Capsicum annuum L.; henceforth, jalapeño or chili) is the most important land use in the southern Yucatán peninsular region in terms of the numbers of farmers engaged in the practice and the total area devoted to it. Chili surpasses all other land uses in the way that it ties the region to the national economy and the way that it has altered household economies and land use. Open-backed semi-trailers and large pick-up trucks crowd the paved roads of the region between October and the end of January laden with large bags of jalapeños taken on the way to central gathering areas and, ultimately, the central wholesale market in Mexico City (Fig. 10.1). The flow of chili at this time is so large that even the casual observer would have little problem concurring with Uc Reyes’s (1999: 4.24) claims that ‘su cultivo [chile] constituye la más importante fuente de ingreso para los productores hortícolas de la entidad, además es generador de empleos para los trabajadores del campo.’ (Its cultivation constitutes the most important source of income for horticultural producers, and generates jobs for field workers.) The spread of the jalapeño describes how farmers adopt new crops, change their agriculture, and ultimately change their livelihood. It also teaches how land covers—forest, savanna, and farm field—can travel a new trajectory over a relatively short period of time, changing not only the way a region or landscape looks but the way it is viewed (Gudeman 1978; Watts and Goodman 1997). These changes began in 1975 when colonizing farmers arrived from a traditional chili-growing zone—the Chiapas/Veracruz border—and introduced its commercial cultivation. After the first year they recruited national intermediaries or middlemen (in Spanish: coyote) to purchase and transport their product to the national market in Mexico City. Observing the success of the first jalapeño pioneers, other smallholders began to adopt the practice. Today, the south-central portion of the study region is called the zonas chileras (chile-growing zones); about 85 per cent of the smallholders there cultivate chili on as much as 7,500ha, usually on small plots, about 1.5ha on average (mean = 1.42 ha).

Succeeding phases of British economic growth prompted strikingly different imperatives for expansion, for natural resource exploitation, and for the social organization of extra-European production. In the eighteenth century, sugar, African slaves, and shipping in the Atlantic world provided one major dynamic of empire. But in the nineteenth century, antipodean settlement and trade, especially that resulting from expanding settler pastoral frontiers, was responsible for some of the most dramatic social and environmental transformations. Plantations occupied relatively little space in the new social geography of world production. By contrast, commercial pastoralism, which took root most energetically in the temperate and semi-arid regions of the newly conquered world, was land-hungry but relatively light in its demands for labour. The Spanish Empire based in Mexico can be considered a forerunner. By the 1580s, within fifty years of their introduction, there were an estimated 4.5 million merino sheep in the Mexican highlands. The livestock economy, incorporating cattle as well as sheep, spread northwards through Mexico to what became California by the eighteenth century. Settler intrusions followed in the vast landmasses of southern Latin America, southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Australia was one of the last-invaded of these territories, and, in respect of the issues that we are exploring, was in some senses distinctive. Unlike Canada and South Africa, there was no long, slow period of trade and interaction with the indigenous population; like the Caribbean, the Aboriginal people were quickly displaced by disease and conquest. The relative scale of the pastoral economy was greater than in any other British colony. Supply of meat and dairy products to rapidly growing ports and urban centres was one priority for livestock farmers. Cattle ranching remained a major feature of livestock production in Australia. Bullock-carts, not dissimilar to South African ox-wagons, were essential for Australian transport up to the 1870s. But for well over a century, from the 1820s to the 1950s and beyond, sheep flooded the southern lands. Although mutton became a significant export from New Zealand and South America, wool was probably the major product of these pastoral hinterlands—and a key focus of production in Australia and South Africa. The growth in antipodean sheep numbers was staggering.

Abstract As floating wind farms move from pilot projects to commercial-scale installations they will move further offshore and into deeper water. There will be a requirement for offshore substations to deliver the electricity to shore, for which floating support structures will be the preferred solution. This paper describes the challenges and development of solutions for commercial-scale HVAC and HVDC floating offshore substations. Two different floating substation concepts have been developed. Layouts for the electrical and ancillary equipment were initially developed, to enable efficient pa

Offshore wind energy extraction has gathered momentum around the world due to its advantages over onshore wind farms at various fronts. The floating support system with vertical axis wind turbine might prove to be feasible concept in medium to deep waters. In this context, this paper addresses an investigation of hydrodynamic analysis of three column semi-submersible with Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) in parked condition under regular and random waves. Free decay experiments were conducted for using scale model (1:75) in a laboratory wave basin at the Department of Ocean Engineering in Ind

Large-scale commercial exploitation of wave energy is certain to require the deployment of wave energy converters (WECs) in arrays, creating ‘WEC farms’. An understanding of the hydrodynamic interactions in such arrays is essential for determining optimum layouts of WECs, as well as calculating the area of ocean that the farms will require. It is equally important to consider the potential impact of wave farms on the local and distal wave climates and coastal processes; a poor understanding of the resulting environmental impact may hamper progress, as it would make planning consents more diffi

Pulse jet mixed (PJM) process vessels are being developed for storing, blending, and chemical processing of nuclear waste slurries at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) to be built at Hanford, Washington. These waste slurries exhibit variable process feed characteristics including Newtonian to non-Newtonian rheologies over a range of solids loadings. Waste feed to the WTP from the Hanford Tank Farms will be accomplished via the Waste Feed Delivery (WFD) system which includes million-gallon underground storage double-shell tanks (DSTs) with dual-opposed jet mixer pumps. Experien